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Welcome to the February issue of HSPH
Update, an e-letter for friends of the
Harvard School of Public Health.
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Employer wellness programs prod workers to adopt healthy lifestyles
Companies have long had an interest in keeping workers healthy, productive, and satisfied while cutting health care and insurance costs. Increasingly, though, they are using incentives -- and disincentives -- to rein in these costs' runaway growth.
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Harvard College Alcohol Study calls for changes at U.S. schools
Fed up with their inability to deter underage students from binge
drinking on campus, 120 U.S. college presidents proposed this past
summer to open up a national debate about the legal drinking age. "21
is not working," the presidents opined. Younger students were flouting
the law. But in raising the possibility of a lower legal age, the presidents met with a din of protest from experts in law enforcement, education, and substance abuse -- not to mention parents,
including Mothers Against Drunk Driving.
Many protesters, including op-ed writers at the New York Times and the Washington Post,
have drawn support for their argument from the father-of-all-drinking
studies: the Harvard School of Public Health's College Alcohol Study.
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Heart disease prevention: The impact of genetics, stress, and lifestyle
Cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of premature death in
the United States, killing about 870,000 people a year. Of these,
female victims outnumber males by roughly 50,000, partly because their
symptoms too often go unrecognized. What's the average person to do?
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Remembering the late HSPH Nobel Laureate, Thomas Weller
As the polio virus swept across the United States in 1948, 32-year-old
Thomas Weller was logging long hours in a Harvard Medical School
laboratory, working to develop a new way to culture viruses in test
tubes so that scientists could then test drugs against the pathogens. Weller later recalled no "eureka" moment, but persistence and serendipity led to a breakthrough technique that would earn him and his colleagues a Nobel Prize and pave the way for production of a polio vaccine.
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HSPH Mentoring Campaign Enlists Obama
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HSPH's Jay Winsten scored a presidential coup of sorts by getting President Obama to appear in an ad promoting National Mentoring Month in January.
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Safe surgery checklists cut deaths, complications
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Hospital pilot sites show surgical safety checklist drops deaths and complications by more than one third.
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